something wicked this way comes
by irishais
Summary: The succession always continues.
1. iteration one

**A/N: Highly, highly experimental idea-slash-storytelling method. I'm either channeling too much **_**House of Leaves**_**, or I have finally cracked. **

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**something wicked this way comes**

_-irishais-_

_There is no good or bad; just opinion and perspective._

_-Squall Leonhart_

(iteration one)

_How much longer?_

_Not long now._

_Will it hurt?  
_

_More than you can imagine._

_That's not what I wanted to hear._

_But it's the truth._

at first, it comes on slowly, a whisper, a breeze, a sigh in her ear that tells her that something is there, something waits, something is just a little off, and then it builds, builds, builds until there are voices everywhere, but only this one voice matters, the one telling her that her time is now her time is now

_her time is now_

and her scream goes on forever.

_xx_

She comes to herself, slowly, carefully, the petals unpeeling from a bloody red rose. The first thing she is aware of is the silence, a rush of nothing and everything all at once, a vast _knowing_ of things.

(who who who)

The power is _there_, so profound that she can reach out and run her fingers through it, gathering the magic in her hands and feeling it hum through her very core.

(Quistis calls it source magic, and she wants to laugh, because Quistis doesn't know how right she is.)

_who are you?_

The question hangs, an unanswered nuisance buzzing around her head.

She hears the clomp, clomp, clomp of a man's boots against the floor, and the corners of her mouth turn up in a smile.

"Rinoa?"

_xx_

there

is

something

waiting

in

the

shadows

_xx_

It's so easy to persuade him to go to Centra with her, where his matron waits in a crumbling lighthouse, the damsel that no longer needs rescuing. The boat ride is long and choppy, and the saltwater that blows against her lips is bitter(sweet).

She laughs in the morning air, and he watches her curiously.

_(Soon_, the voice tells her, _he will need to know.)_

"How good to see you," Edea says, and her hair is a streaming black veil around her shoulders. "This is such a nice surprise."

Squall hugs her, the most affection he gives anyone outside of Rinoa, and she waits, patiently, not touching the older woman.

The magic hums, louder, singing out to kin in blood and darkness, and she tries to suppress it, just a little.

_No_, the magic tells her_, no no no. _

Edea looks at her with wise dark eyes.

_xx_

"No!" she screams, fighting and pulling against Squall's grip as Dr. Kadowaki advances upon her with the Odine bangle, the metal glinting ugly silver in the dim light. "No, _I won't_, you can't put that on me!"

"Rinoa-" and she hates him for saying anything at all, "you _have _to. Just for a little while. Until you can calm it down."

The very thought of what the Odine metal represents, being cut off from everything, makes her eyes sting with tears and fury. "You're supposed to _protect_ me!" she cries, and he pulls her into a fierce warrior's embrace, pinning her upper arms to her body. She claws at his back ineffectually, her nails snagging on the thin weave of his shirt.

"Please," he says, "_please_. For both of us."

Kadowaki hovers, waiting for the commander's say-so.

"I can control it," she whispers.

"I know. But-"

She tears herself from his grasp and the walls shudder with the force of the magic pouring off of her- the magic burns up in her veins, _yes yes yes_, and she pushes against the wall leading outside, Squall lunging after her, and it parts for her, disintegrating under her hands.

(for a half-second she is nowhere, and she is afraid she has failed.)

But she is suddenly outside, running across the dead grass. Squall is yelling for her to stop- she chances a glance over her shoulder. There is a hole in the side of Garden that she has made, and he is clambering through it, running after her.

_run run run_, the voice urges her, and she heeds it, tearing across the open field to the sea.

She has just enough time to think that she can barely swim when her wings explode out from behind her and she is flying.


	2. iteration two

(iteration two)

It's the witching hour of the night, and the streets of Deling City are empty, so the weeping is what grabs hold of her attention. Fujin follows the sound carefully, fingering the switchblade in her pocket.

The alleyway smells like vomit, urine, every bad smell rolled into one, and she almost turns around and heads back the way she came, because no crying girl is worth walking into a place that smells worse than the bottom of Raijin's laundry pile. She withdraws the knife from her pocket, slipping into the alley.

The weeping subsides, a little, and it's only then that Fujin is aware of the sharp electrical charge in the air. Magic, lots of it. Wild.

_GF?  
_

No. Couldn't be.

"Show yourself," she commands, her switchblade feeling very small in her hands all of a sudden. Walking into the wall of magic takes her breath away, and only an idiot or a former Garden student would continue on unarmed and without backup. Fortunately, Fujin is the latter, and she's not entirely unarmed. If Garden made sure of anything, it was that she would never be defenseless.

(_If we die_, Seifer tells her one night,_ we die with honor_.)

_Don't come any closer!_

The words are...shouted? No, that's wrong, too. It's like they've just burst into the air, come into being from nothing. She is nearly deafened with the force of them.

Metal clinks, rolling across the uneven asphalt, accidentally forced out of the darkness. An empty beer can ends up near Fujin's feet, nudging at her toes. She nudges it away, carefully, trying not to provoke the creature in the darkness.

"Hey," she says, pitching her voice quieter than she usually does, trying to remember how Raijin talked when he rescued that beast of a kitten.

_Stay back. _

She knows that voice.

"It's okay."

Closer, closer, the knife held blade-down close to her thigh. The voice pings as familiar near the forefront of her mind, and she gets a flash of blue. Wings.

The feathers rustle in the dim moonlight, and Fujin finally sees the girl, dark hair whipping around her face with the force of her magic. She's braced herself against the wall (stupid, Fujin thinks, trapping herself in a corner like that) and she isn't wearing blue now. It's a frilly white sundress and it's torn around the hem.

Fujin fumbles for the name. "...Rinoa?"

The angel scrubs her hands against her face to wipe away streaks of tears and mascara. If it weren't slightly terrifying, in a _deja-vu _sort of way, Fujin would have laughed at the sight. She has no patience for crying women.

"Squall?" Fujin says, after a moment.

_I can't go back_.

She shrugs, and turns, gesturing for Rinoa to follow her. Smart move, probably, putting her back to a sorceress. "Okay."

_xx_

the streets of deling city are windy and cold and she is lost, lost, lost.

quickly, quickly, before the sun rises.

(_or what?_ will she burn up like a vampire? she hates garlic, but she loves the sun.)

_S-s-s-s-quall_

his name is an echo on the midnight wind and she wishes the girl had never said it.

"come _on_," fujin says, her voice clipped and brisk, like she is working on a limited ration of words and is about to use up her quota for the day.

they are going up stairs now, a narrow winding metal fire escape that hurts her feet to walk up. music comes out of one open window, an electronic tune punctuated by explosions and gunfire.

she halts.

_no. _

fujin looks at her with a quirked eyebrow.

_dangerdangerdanger_

the window sash is thrown open, higher, and fujin pushes her way through the dark curtains. after a second, the noises stop, and rinoa hears the indignant shouting of a couple of male voices. she knows one. knows him. knows him.

fujin sticks her head out from between the drapery and gestures her inside.

her wings suck themselves back into her shoulderblades, and she shudders with the ssssensation they leave behind. awkwardly, a reversed escape, she clambers over the ledge.

"...rinoa?"


	3. iteration three

(iteration three)

do you feel it?

_there_, waiting

it's calling out

to you to come

back to it, a

siren song of

lustpowergreed

burning up in

your heart

and it's close

enough

to

touch.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" The words explode out of his mouth before he can stop them, and once they're out, it's not like he wants to take them back anyway, because it is a perfectly valid question. There is a sorceress in his living room, and she carries with her the stink of magic. He glares at Fujin, then Rinoa, then back at Fujin, who shrugs and crosses her arms.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't know...Fujin was... I can leave."

"You should."

His tone is unapologetically hard. She has no _right _to be here. But her face scrunches up in that ridiculous way that indicates she's going to start bawling like a five year old, and, while Seifer Almasy's heart is a shriveled-up dead thing in his chest, he _almost_ feels bad. Almost. And that doesn't count for _anything_, these days.

Raijin makes a move for the remote to turn the video game back on, and Seifer stops him with a cold look.

"Where's your keeper?" he demands.

Rinoa sniffles, shrugging, wrapping her arms around herself. "He tried to- he-"

Seifer fills in the blanks, and he's pretty sure that every single answer running through his head is wrong, but the fury still flares up inside of him nonetheless. Squall's a little shit, and so it's nice to be proven right, to give Seifer something to be legitimately pissed off about.

Rinoa is crying in the middle of his damn living room, and so he grabs her arm. "Come on," he says, and glares when Fujin and Raijin both open their mouths to say something.

He leads her down the hallway to the one closed door, twisting the knob and pushing it open. His bedroom is simply decorated, dark bedding and a laundry basket in need of attention sitting in the corner. In a grand, sarcastic gesture, he sweeps his arm before him. "After you," he says, and Rinoa steps forward. An empty glass left on his desk clatters as she sighs.

"You break anything, you owe me," he tells her, and closes the door.

There is silence.

"You can't come here, and then just clam up."

The glass shakes, harder. She looks away.

"I cannot possibly give less of a crap about letting Leonhart know where you are, if that's what's bothering you."

She shrugs. The glass topples over the edge of the desk and falls against the carpet. Seifer glances at it; in the second he averts his gaze, she reaches out and snares his hand, snakebite quick. He freezes.

"It's- I don't know what's happening to me," she whispers.

_xx_

_lies lies lies_

_blood power glory _

_the castle is waiting_

_for you_


	4. iteration four

(iteration four)

_No._

The word is a screaming Galbadian missile, rocketing down through her head with a searing whistle, tearing through delicate neural tissue with such supreme accuracy that she is certain she is dead. It lands with a shatter in the sink; she looks at the ruins of Cid's favorite mug strewn about the stainless steel.

_no no no. _

She holds fast to the counter-edges, the granite slippery-smooth underneath her palms. Breathe. Breathe. _How?_

"Edea..." Cid is there at her elbow, his mobile telephone tight in his hand- she can hear a male voice coming from it, crackling with the static of crossing an ocean through a satellite. "What is it? What's wrong?"

Her breath hitches, catches, and there, there it is, she is breathing again, rapidly, but breathing. "I'm fine," she says, the second word sliding out on an exhalation. She reaches into the sink, her hand trembling, and grabs the first piece of shattered ceramic she touches. The edges are sharp against her fingertips. Edea sets it down on the countertop, and repeats the process, slowly.

"Be careful," Cid says, and his words are dim, echoing around her, meaningless. "Let me do that."

His attention is half on her, half on the telephone, and he puts the latter to his ear. "Do whatever you need to do," he tells the voice on the other line, and she knows that it is Garden. The telephone rarely rings now, except for emergencies, and this must be an emergency.

She gives up on the tiny bits of the cup's remnants, and washes everything down the sink's wide drain. The water swirls around and around, picking up the scattered bits and dragging them down to darker places. The faucet squeaks when she turns the handle to shut it off.

"Sit down," Cid says, and she loves her husband but he does not know what she knows. "Sit down, love."

"No," she tells him, and the word is a sharp snap. How many ways that one word can be said! It would be something to marvel about if she weren't aware of how painful a weapon it could actually be- she sees it in his face, a confusion that he will never be able to get to the root of. "I need some air."

She walks out of the kitchen (she escapes.)

_xx_

The sea air is salty blue against her face, a scent and taste she would go mad without. The ocean is freedom, a vast expanse that will take her everywhere, anywhere, and all she has to do is say the word.

_run run run_.

She knows for a fact that Garden has this in a report somewhere: When she passed on her "Sorceress abilities" to Rinoa Heartilly, she gave up all the gifts that went with it. It's a file in Squall Leonhart's office. Cid keeps a duplicate copy locked in his desk. Edea has read every single word of it; the truth is hard to find in the report, buried under ten-gil words that mean little, even when she digs them up in their battered old dictionary of legal terms.

The important gifts are gone, yes- the telepathy, the magic, the better part of the bond (her child, her son.)

The dark spot in her chest will always remain, a corn kernel of source magic that no amount of healing elixirs could ever excise out of her. She thinks she might choke on it now.

Not again, it can't happen again. She accepted the magic, knowing the price she paid for it, and it turned on her, skewing her into something dark, something wicked.

_the witch_

_is not dead. _

_xx_

"Your orders, sir?"

He stares at a blank spot on the wall just above Xu's shoulder. There are procedures to be followed, protocol. He wants to say she's just run off somewhere in another one of her moods. Rinoa will come back. She'll calm down. They can proceed as usual.

_liar. _

"...Commander?"

They've been here before, he knows, only with Cid in his chair. Squall had been the one to stand on the other side of the desk, at attention, a freshly promoted SeeD.

He feels her out there, a string stretched taut in the dark

stretched taut in the dark.


	5. iteration five

(iteration five)

_Howl_, the voices whisper, beating against her brain. _Howl._

She runs through the tall beach grasses, the stalks scratching against her bare calves, the sand springing up with every step, assaulting her skin and digging deep. Her breath comes in spurts and gasps.

_Howl._

Her heart expands and contracts as her blood pumps through her veins and she hears _everything, _the staccato drum of her pulse so sharp that she believes that her wrist, her neck, her chest are all going to explode, that she will leave nothing but a stain on the pale sand for them to find.

_Howl._

She runs to the water and as the icy waves slam into her, something inside of her finally gives way at the water's pressure, the snap of a brittle bone-not-a-bone, her very _being_ breaking in half. Her screaming echoes into the empty night, tearing her throat raw with the effort, and there is no one left to hear her.

_xx_

She jerks awake, twisting in the sheets of a bed she doesn't know, and thinks she's still dreaming, because the entire room is shaking with the force of it.

"_Rinoa_-"

The room door bursts open, and Seifer is there _(Seifer?)_, grabbing her arm and hauling her out of the bed. She doesn't have any shoes, she realizes, and the thought is silly-irrational.

"What-"

"Are you doing this?" he demands, and doesn't wait for an answer. Cracks are forming in the walls, and Rinoa doesn't know what's _happening_-

"Come on!" he yells at her, yanking her arm, forcing her to stumble out of the bed. She trips, falls against him, and he grabs her by the shoulders, shoving her in front of him. Raijin grabs her arms next, dragging her through the window onto the fire escape- it's _freezing_, what's happening?

_-I WILL NEVER LET YOU FORGET ABOUT ME-_

The building lets out a great, horrible groan as the entire structure shudders. Below, a city's worth of people are gathered, watching them. Seifer swears, and shoves her forward down the steps.

_IWILLNEVERLETYOUF O R G E T A B O U T M E_

The power thuds in her chest, her own personal nuclear blast.

**_ME E E E EEE E -_**

There is a ru-u-u-u-u-sh of static in her ears, and then Rinoa hears nothing.

_xx_

when she wakes up, she can smell the ocean.


	6. iteration six

(iteration six)

She is waiting for them, a spectre in black standing at the edge of the ocean, and the closer they get, the farther away she seems.

Fujin guides the boat up next to the narrow dock, the bump of hull against salt-stained pier the only indication of their arrival. Seifer stands, and Rinoa remains in a huddled pile on the deck.

"Come on," he says, his voice gruff. "We're here."

She looks at him, a faint blush of red on her nose and cheeks, the sun's doing. There's something in her expression that makes him feel like a bug under glass, and so he turns from her, lightly jumping the span from deck to dock. Wordlessly, she follows him, and when Seifer reaches to help her across, he's startled by how delicate her hand is, how fragile. Like he could break her with the wrong word, the wrong look.

Edea meets them halfway across the stretch of sand, and her expression is even worse than Rinoa's, because Seifer has seen it before- a look of great and terrible _knowing_.

Something in his chest squeezes, just a little bit, a hangman's noose beginning to tighten on his soul.

"Poor child," Edea says, softly, "poor, poor child."

_xx_

(in her ears is the painful ticking of a never-ending clock-bomb.

_tick tick tick tick it goes, tock tick tick tick tock. _

_poor child_, she says, _poor child. _

poor everyone else.)

Something writhes within her, clawing at her skin, wanting to get out.

She lets Edea lead her into the orphanage-by-the-sea, the place she does not belong. The place that no one belongs, and the place that no one stays at. There are monsters here, hiding in sand dunes and beneath the sea and behind the blue-painted door. She lets Edea lead her, and tries to ignore the beast within her belly.


End file.
